All posts filed under: Places

In the fall of 1986, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that an American farm was going out of business every six minutes. Not long after, photographer George Ancona and writer Joan Anderson set out to document this important American institution. Two years of telephone calls, research, and travel led them to focus on three very different farm families: the MacMillans, in Massachusetts, who specialize in dairy farming; the Adamses, in Georgia, who raise chickens and have created a farm cooperative; and the Rosmanns, in Iowa, who have an organic hog and grain operation.

El Rancho de Las Golondrinas is a settlement that served as a fort and an inn on the Camino Real during the seventeenth century in what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico. Interpreters dress and act the part of the early colonists. We see the families work the fields, the visiting monks who sustain the faith of the settlers.

Dolphins are extraordinary creatures. Who would not be thrilled to rub noses with them in the water, grab on to their dorsal fins and go for a fast ride, to watch them leap high overhead, and even to pet their snouts gently? Visitors do this daily at the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key, Florida. They also see how dolphins are fed, cared for, and trained to perform in shows.

We’re off to the zoo! In a lively story told with colorful photographs, text and American Sign Language. Mary Beth and a group of children spend a fun filled day visiting the animals. The day is a full one, with stops to feed the sea lions, eat lunch, and find Roger. As the children see their favorite animals, they demonstrate the signs and fingerspelling for each one.

From Map To Museum is the behind the scenes story of one museum collection. This intriguing photo essay focuses on a major method of museum acquisition–the archeological dig–and one modern-day explorer, Dr. David Hurst Thomas, curator of anthropology at the Museum of Natural History in New York City and a leading archeologist in the field. It is a long painstaking journey from map to museum that begins on a tropical island off the coast of Georgia, where a real-life expedition is uncovering a lost Spanish mission and an extinct group of Indians, and ends in the storage rooms, curator’s offices and exhibit cases of the museum.

This is the story of Jackpot, a little brown beagle that does a very big job for all of us. Working at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Jackpot makes sure products that could be carrying disease—and could infect our agriculture—don’t get into this country.

Joshua Carpenter and his family have been traveling for over a month now, heading west to Illinois, or possibly even Iowa. With all their possessions in a crowded Conestoga wagon, they cover mile after mile of the dusty, government-built trail called the National Road. Food is often scarce, and sometimes the water in their barrel reaches frighteningly low levels. But courage, and dreams of affordable land and a better life, spur them on.

The Curtis family has recently moved to Prairietown from a thriving village in New York State. The four Curtis children, especially Thomas, are determined that Christmas will be just as wonderful as it was back east. But how can it be? So many ingredients of the family’s traditional Christmas customs are missing on the frontier.

Today there is a deep blue lake where Papa and Mama and Lucy and Malinda lived. Their home was a little gray house that sat in a valley, with hills all around. Not many people know that deep down under the waters of the lake is the place where Lucy and Malinda’s baby brother was born, where Mama killed a rattlesnake as big around as a man’s wrist, and where Papa chopped weeds out of his cotton patch.

On a magic carpet of memory, Louise Jackson carries the young reader back in time to that simpler world she knew as a child growing up in rural Texas during the 1940’s. Her vivid reminiscences provide a please akin to discovering an old patchwork quilt, or coming upon great grandfather’s long-lost packet watch and chain.